[allovernow]

Unfortunately a vaccine is unlikely to work. This is probably being done more for optics. This virus likely has Antibody Dependent Enhancement. Same reason there's no vaccine for SARS or MERS. It's 4am and I should be sleeping but there's a paper floating around where a bunch of SARS candidates were trialed on multiple species. In ever case immunity was conferred but upon re-exposure the animals had autoimmune lung damage.

This virus is far more dangerous than most people understand now. The news media has been a month late in everything since they started reporting because all of this is evolving too rapidly to confirm to journalistic standards. You have to dig for this information yourself.

[Mvandenbergh]

I disagree that this is being done for optics. Conspiracy theories rely on people being much better at keeping secrets than we know they are.

There does seem to be some evidence that other Coronaviruses may exhibit ADE but it's important to note that ADE is not well understood and that many viruses seem to display it in-vitro but non in-vivo.

In particular, vaccines and monoclonal antibodies targeted at SARS spike proteins seemed to cause ADE in some experiments but not in others.

There has also been at least one paper that speculated that the virus was deadlier in China than South Korea due to pre-existing exposure of the population so similar Coronaviruses and ADE cross-over from them. This was before the big spikes in mortality in Iran and Italy which would be pretty strong counter-evidence to this hypothesis.

I think it is best for us to treat our both our species-level understanding and our personal understanding of immunology and epidemiology (assuming that like me, you are reading papers but have not spent significant pre-existing time studying this field) with an appropriate level of epistemic skepticism. I would be careful of making statements like "a vaccine is unlikely to work" unless you have a high degree of confidence in your own understanding of the state-of-the-art.

(I haven't downvoted you and would encourage others not to do so as that mechanism is intended to remove noise and not to signal disagreement)

[nnq]

> Conspiracy theories rely on people being much better at keeping secrets than we know they are.

Most people have no idea WHY they are doing what they are doing! Like the actual true long-term business objective of a task etc. Successful task completion usually requires only technical details and immediate organizational ones. Fake goals are easy to sell to investors and board members by expert manipulator sociopaths (the kind of people explicitly hired and selected for top executive roles).

You can make immense progress towards a goal you know nothing about. You can't leak a secret you don't know.

That's kind of how human societal evolution works, only the bigger goals are evolved/emergent instead of envisioned by some dark conspiratorial cabal. But you can't rule out the latter.

As a society we need to maintain some "immune reaction potential" against nefarious manipulation by entertaining unlikely conspiracy theories too!

[jeen02]

You're a ML engineer, not a specialist in this area.

[mrb]

I hate credentialism like this. It's anti-intellectual.

There are many smart people on HN who are perfectly capable of reading and understanding research literature in an area that is NOT their primary expertise, and who can make half-decent arguments and deductions.

Reply to the points he raises (if you can). Don't belittle him.

[gjulianm]

> There are many smart people on HN who are perfectly capable of reading and understanding research literature in an area that is NOT their primary expertise

Most of those people know that reading papers is far from enough to understand the issues at hand and making such stark statements. I've seen this issue a lot in HN: people who have no experience at all in a field, who think they are very smart, reading something on a paper or Wikipedia and then making these broad statements, specially without any sources. Intellectualism implies being humble and recognizing when one is not an expert in the matter, in order to avoid spreading misinformation and doubt.

[allovernow]

>Most of those people know that reading papers is far from enough to understand the issues at hand and making such stark statements

Some of us people know that grad school literally consists of learning potentially exclusively from papers. These papers represent the cutting edge of human knowledge and for someone familiar with scientific literature they are not that hard to parse. Doctors and scientists are humans like you and me.

I'm not making policy here, I'm posting on a forum where unusually intelligent people from all disciplines gather and casually speculate on any number of topics. Though I guarantee at this point that I understand the problem at least as well as some 90% of our politicians...with or without sources.

[gjulianm]

> Some of us people know that grad school literally consists of learning potentially exclusively from papers. These papers represent the cutting edge of human knowledge and for someone familiar with scientific literature they are not that hard to parse. Doctors and scientists are humans like you and me.

Doctors and scientists are humans that, like you and me, spend years and years of study, practice and research on their own specific topic, with knowledgeable people by their side to guide, question them and answer their doubts. Parsing a paper is very different from actually understanding it, specially if you don't have the context they have.

> I'm not making policy here

You're right, but we have already enough disinformation as it is. We all have a certain responsibility towards not sharing unfounded statements in this situation.

> a forum where unusually intelligent people from all disciplines gather

HN is an echo chamber of programmers, mostly from the start-up world. A constant issue in this forum is programmers thinking that they can solve any problem (I still remember some discussions on sheet music that were extremely out of touch with actual music practice).

Also, "unusually intelligent"? Really?

> Though I guarantee at this point that I understand the problem at least as well as some 90% of our politicians...with or without sources.

The arrogance here is astounding.

[unityByFreedom]

Credentialism aside, there were no sources provided.

I do find the point about no SARS vaccine compelling, however. Is that true?

I know the flu vaccine gets updated every year or so with new viruses that are prevalent, so if there is no SARS vaccine then I wonder if that is true and if it is true it couldn't be developed.

Again, multiple things thrown out there without sources which are not common knowledge, followed by "you can look this up yourself".

[OJFord]

I've only quickly searched, and to be honest it's a bit thick with foreign terminology for me to quickly glean much from it, but seems like this might be the paper the top-level commenter referred to:

https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2FJVI.02395-10

> I do find the point about no SARS [-CoV[-1]] vaccine compelling, however. Is that true?

Wikipedia says so, and just gives essentially the same advice as being given for SARS-CoV-2 (or any human-transmissible virus, I imagine).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

[mellavora]

ok, jean02, fair enough.

by your admission the person you are referring to is an engineer in a highly specialized field and is likely to be skilled at probabilistic inference as well as dissecting (certain types of) scientific publications.

I do have some special knowledge in biological research, from seven years of post-doc work at the Max Planck Institute for Computational Biology. We're the group that created the standard of care software for HIV treatment, and for a time we hosted the global influenza database. In other words, viral disease was a specialty of ours.

In my view, as someone with some high level expertise in the field, is that the original poster is correct in their assessment.

[PedroBatista]

Then you can use all your fancy credentials to counter people’s arguments in a pedagogical way, I assume.

[duaoebg]

I'm a ML engineer as well. There is almost nothing like it. I can go from having an idea to having the real world results in under an hour.

You're constantly having your biases thrown in your face in a way that many other professions do not.

These skills and others do genralize very well.

[allovernow]

Oh my God yes I'm glad to see someone understand. Especially if you have a generalists background. ML is incredibly powerful because deep neural networks, as we're discovering, are extremely powerful, extremely general function approximators. We're inching toward a new type of mathematics.

I've been reaching out to prominent people and I'm getting interest in some kind of collaboration with funding. People are onto the tech and it's myriad applications. There's a reason ML engineer was ranked #1 be demand growth (300%) on indeed last year!

[glouwbug]

This would make for some excellent copy pasta

[allovernow]

You don't understand. I am making this assertion as a former physicist. We have stumbled upon extremely general function approximators.

Effectively the same way that we can use equations to make inferences about reality - but because of the nature of mathematical notation and the limitations of human ability, though powerful, math has limitations. E.g. you can write out the idealized equations for heat propagation in a conductive medium, but solving them for a real object requires empirical simulation.

Deep neural nets are the next step. Now you can essentially train these neural networks to infer not just the general idealized behaviors, but specific details, discrete values for X and Y on a fine grid that are beyond the practical limits of applied math.

But this is much bigger. It turns out that, much in the way that idealized equations apply to many problems (e.g. exponential growth arising from diff EQ), neural nets generalize to all manner of real world problems, provided the training data is appropriately curated.

These neural networks excel at learning human like heuristics, with machine level precision. You can make inferences for both continuous and discrete probabilistic systems. This is a major development and it's just starting. We've finally assembled the pieces in the last few years.

[15rthughes]

Deep neural networks and their training process rely on multi variable calculus, this is nowhere near a new type of mathematics.

[carpetfizz]

I think you misspelled matrix multiplication

[niea_11]

I thought that no vaccine was developed for SARS and MERS because the diseases disappeared, so : not enough volunteers to test the vaccines, and also companies lost interest.

from an npr interview[1] :

BRIGHT: Unfortunately, when the virus disappeared, the funding tended to disappear with it. And the companies that were making a SARS virus vaccine lost interest and shipped it back to their more profitable vaccines.

[1] : https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815307821/planet-money-why-th...

[mcv]

Were SARS and MERS completely wiped out without any vaccine? That's actually rather impressive.

[nnq]

Hmm... ADE shouldn't happen with natural immunity post-infection since the body tends to produce a cocktail of different antibodies and either some or the combo would have some virus neutralizing effects. But it's known to happen in-vitro and with vaccine generated antibodies (always less diverse than the ones generated naturally).

Natural-ADE shouldn't thwart development of a live/innactivated-virus vaccine though. But would immensely slow the dev of RNA or protein ones since you'd have to test through a lot of candidate variants until you find one that is not ADE-inducing...

Otoh, a population of naturally-immune survivors is a living library of antibody cocktails that are know to work. If I were more conspiracy-theory inclined, I'd say the UK gov. has knowledge along these lines and they are willing to sacrifice some of the gen. pop. knowing that (a) it will take a looong time to a good vaccine, so better for the economy if they get natural immunity faster than everyone else, also lots of arbitrage opportunities on international markets once they're first to recover, and (b) they bet their "living library" of good antibodies will maybe make them a leading producer of safe vaccines.

Now, if this COVID bugger does ADE with naturally induced immunity... that's BAAAD! Natural evolution would have no reason to optimize in that direction, and genetic lottery is probably not likely to produce this. You get the conclusion and geopolitical consequences... it's something something about that doomsday-clock striking a certain hour...

DISCLAIMER: I'm not an expert on the topic, or any other topic in general. Just another expert-generalist currently doing mostly software thinggies but having some old and rusty biomedsci background...